Saturday, April 30, 2016

Well, here we go again. Like last week, our readings this Sunday tell
us of visions – both the reading from Revelation, which itself is one gigantic
vision, and the reading from the Acts of the Apostles. I can almost hear your incredulity. We
like to think of ourselves as sophisticated, enlightened people who make solid
decisions based on evidence and reason.
Visions of giant sheets filled with wild animals seem a little premodern
for people like us.

Let’s look at what’s happening in this
vision Peter describes in Acts. I like
to think of this story as an extended exercise in God asking us – all of us –
“What do you know?” What do you really know?

We meet Peter trying to explain himself to
the “apostles and believers” in Jerusalem (11:1). He’s getting flak from the church because
he’s been hanging out with the wrong people.
In the previous chapter of Acts, we hear about Peter not just eating
with uncircumcised men. He saw the Holy
Spirit come upon them, and then he baptized them, accepting them fully into the
community of God’s people – all without their having gone through the process
of becoming Jewish.

Now, we can see this at a surface level
and critique the Jewish followers of Christ for being exclusive or
small-minded, for wanting to keep the doors to “the club” closed. But that’s really not fair. Their concern wasn’t about ritual rigor; their
concern was about the survival of their faith.
Except for a few blinks of the eye of history, Jewish people have always
been a minority presence in other cultures that would have been happy to see
their way of life evaporate. The Roman
Empire was no different. So, from a
Jewish perspective, keeping the Law – keeping themselves set aside as God’s own
people – that was the only way to ensure they’d still be there in the next
generation.

But Peter had this vision, as he told his
new church gathered to grill him. He was
minding his own business, praying, when he saw “something like a sheet coming
down from heaven” (Acts 11:5). And on
that sheet was the passenger list from Noah’s Ark – every kind of animal he
could imagine. And God said to him –
very clearly, and three times for emphasis – that all these animals were now to
be featured on the Jewish dinner menu.
That made no sense to Peter, and it may be hard for us to imagine just
how little sense it made. It ran
contrary to everything they knew. It
would have been like God telling the Southern Baptist Convention they should serve
mixed drinks and play cards.

And then, Peter received a visit from
non-Jewish strangers who asked him to follow them to a different city and share
whatever God gave him to say with a Roman army officer named Cornelius. Now earlier, Cornelius had had his own
vision, with God telling him to summon Peter and listen to what he would tell
him. So, based on the vision of the
animals, Peter told Cornelius and his household that God shows no partiality; they
were welcome in God’s beloved community just as they were, and that they too
should follow the risen Christ. And as Peter
said all this, he witnessed the Holy Spirit come upon them just as it had come upon
the apostles themselves. Being a keen
student of the obvious, Peter suggested it might be a good idea to baptize these
people and make it official. As Peter told
his church meeting, “If … God gave them
the same gift that [God] gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who
was I that I could hinder God?” (Acts 11:17)
For Peter, the truth had changed.
What he now knew with all his heart wasn’t the same as the truth he’d “always
known” just a few days before.

Blessed with hindsight, we can see Peter
was right. But in the moment, Peter was
asking the faithful to let go of something they had “known” all their lives. The stumbling block here wasn’t the challenge
of God’s new mission to show all people how deeply God loves them. The stumbling block here was the people God
had chosen in the first place, people none too happy to have Peter rock their
theological worlds. The truth of this
story about the “conversion of the Gentiles” is that God’s chosen people were
being called to just as much conversion as anybody else. For God’s mission to go forward, both “clean”
and “unclean” people need to change how they think, need to turn in a new
direction, which is what the word “repent” really means and what we’re all
called to do. As Will Willimon writes, repentance
is the “joyful … necessary … turn of a life which is the recipient of God’s
gracious turning toward us.”1

That change of heart and mind, that turning
in a new direction – that’s something God has been asking of faithful followers
of Christ for a long time now. Think
about some of the things the Church has “known” to be true at various points in
its history. Once, we knew it was a sin
to lend money at interest. Once, we knew
that God had given the Pope authority over the Western Church wherever faithful
people lived, even in England. Once, we
knew Americans couldn’t have bishops of their own. Once, we knew that black people weren’t fully
human like white people and certainly couldn’t be in church leadership. Once, we knew women couldn’t be priests or
bishops. Similarly, once we knew that
the sacraments of holy orders and marriage couldn’t apply to gay and lesbian
people. Once, we knew people who were
divorced and remarried couldn’t receive Communion. And now, we know (at least officially) that
only baptized people can receive Communion – but I wonder how long we will
insist on “knowing” that.

We Episcopalians are Christians of the Big
Tent, and that’s a complicated way of being church. It’s messy.
It means we bump up against people who don’t see the world the same way
we do, as each of us grows more and more into the “measure of the full stature of
Christ” (Ephesians 4:13). But as we
struggle sometimes in asking, “Whom do we welcome?” – “Whom do we include?” –
we’d probably do well to remember to ask ourselves this question: Who wouldn’t
Jesus include?

Just as the Church has had to un-know
several things across the ages in its ongoing process of conversion, so does
each of us. I’m only 51 years old, but
there are lots and lots of things I’ve been blessed to un-know. I once knew that church was a scam. I once knew that I would never have
children. I once knew that I hated
standing up in front of people and talking to them. I once knew that my marriage wouldn’t last. I once knew that I could never be a
priest. Even after the whole ordination
thing happened, I once knew that I would never be called to serve in a church
“like St. Andrew’s,” whatever that means.
I once knew that I could never get a book published. A hundred times along the journey, God has
asked me to change my thinking away from what I “knew.” As Will Willimon says, repentance is “the
divine gift of being able to be turned toward truth”2 as God
continues to reveal it – the truth about God, the truth about the other, the truth
about ourselves.

So, Peter received a vision. And I would dare say we receive visions,
too. It does happen, especially when
we’re paying attention, that God asks us to make changes we wouldn’t have seen
coming. But how do you know that it’s
the Holy Spirit talking to you and not the chili you had the night before, as
friend of mine likes to say?

I think we get some hints in this story
about the conversion of Peter and Cornelius and the early Church. We might know it’s the Holy Spirit when we
hear the same message of change multiple times.
We might know it’s the Holy Spirit when the change is affirmed by multiple
sources. We might know it’s the Holy
Spirit when the change is so great that it would seem to take the action of God
to pull it off. We might know it’s the
Holy Spirit when the change is affirmed by our hearing of God’s Word – in Scripture,
in proclamation, in worship. And when we
know it’s the Holy Spirit, we find ourselves right there with Peter: “Who was I
that I could hinder God?” Peter asked. Even
the dim disciples could see it: “God has given even to the Gentiles the
repentance that leads to life” (Acts 11:18).
Who’d have thought?

So … what do you know? And what might God
be asking you to un-know? What repentance – what change of thinking,
what turn of direction – is God inviting you to take?

The thing is, our pesky deity calls us to
change all the time. I believe that’s
not so much because our brokenness is so deep; I believe that’s because God’s
M.O. is to make things new. We can read
it in Scripture; we can see it in the resurrection of springtime; and we can
hear it from surprising sources sometimes.
I want to play you a snippet from one of the most deeply theological
pieces of popular music ever, a song from Paul Simon.

God and His only
Son

Paid a courtesy
call on Earth

One Sunday morning

Orange blossoms
opened their fragrant lips

Songbirds sang
from the tips of Cottonwoods

Old folks wept for
His love in these hard times

“Well, we got to
get going,” said the restless Lord to the Son

“There are galaxies
yet to be born

Creation is never
done….”3

“Creation is never done.” Well, I guess that’s not precisely right. Eventually
it is done, in the sense of God
bringing to fulfillment the work of reconciliation on a cosmic scale, bringing
heaven and earth back into the unity God intended “in the beginning.” At the final restoration of that unity
between heaven and earth, as we heard in today’s vision from Revelation, when
the home of God comes to be fully among mortals and the restless Lord no longer
has “got to get going” – that’s when
God proclaims, “It is done!” (21:6).

But my hunch is that, even at that moment,
God’s sense of “done” will be a lot more fluid than we can imagine. Even on that
day when earth and heaven are one, even when “the home of God is among mortals”
(21:3), even when “death will be no more” (21:4) – even then, I believe, we will still be works in progress, along with all
creation. For “see,” God says, even at
the story’s end – “See, I am making all things new!” (21:5).

1.Willimon,
William H. Acts. A volume in Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for
Teaching and Preaching. Atlanta:
John Knox Press, 1988. 100.

Monday, April 18, 2016

Our second reading today comes from
the strange and wonderful Book of Revelation, a book most Episcopalians associate
with televangelists and other crazies.
Revelation is actually a fascinating political commentary, asserting
Christ’s power and authority even over the Roman Empire – and whatever human
power we might substitute for Rome in our own day. This morning’s reading paints a picture of a
great multitude, people blessed, through their tribulation on earth, to stand before
the very presence of God.

We’re blessed with our own moments of
transcendence from time to time. When we
get to see through the veil and catch a glimpse of Jesus Christ reigning in
glory – what does that look like? On
Easter morning, in Revelation’s words set to Handel’s glorious accompaniment, we
sang out that “the kingdom of the world is become the kingdom of our God and of
his Christ. And he shall reign for ever
and ever.” (Revelation 11:15) So what do
you think that looks like, when “the kingdom of the world has become the
kingdom of our God and of his Christ”?

Well, as we stumble upon that scene in today’s
reading, we find ourselves in the heavenly throne room. We come along with a “great multitude that no
one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages,
standing before the throne and before the Lamb” (Revelation 7:9). Wait, standing before what? The Lamb?
What lamb?

If we back up a couple of chapters, we learn
who this Lamb is. When the writer of
Revelation sees the heavenly throne for the first time, as the Messiah is about
to make his appearance, the writer expects to see the “Lion of … Judah” (5:5),
the powerful liberating king the Jewish people had been waiting for. But the writer looks up and sees instead “a
Lamb, standing [though] it had been slaughtered” (5:6). The kingdom of the Lord God Almighty has been
given to a slaughtered Lamb. It turns
out the ultimate power of God – the roar of the lion – is fully revealed on the
Cross, in the suffering of the Lamb.1 And now that slaughtered Lamb stands strong,
ready to complete God’s project of reuniting heaven and earth, returning all of
creation back to the garden God made “in the beginning” (Genesis 1:1).

Now, we have trouble wrapping our minds
around all that, and I think we’re supposed to.
The Book of Revelation is not a news report, or a fortune teller’s prediction,
or a copy of God’s day-by-day planning calendar. It’s poetry – a mystical vision that brings
together “in the beginning” and “world without end.”

So hold that thought, because I think I
got a glimpse of that heavenly throne room two Sundays ago. And because God is not only sovereign of all
creation but also a comic genius, the scene even comes with a little humor.

Here’s something I never imagined myself
saying: I got to worship at the altar of
God along with two chickens and a goat. The
occasion was a grand celebration, the 150th anniversary of the
Church of St. Sauveur in Les Cayes, Haiti.
The rector there is our partner priest, Père Colbert, who has been here
with us several times. The worship began
with the congregation and about 30 clergy all processing through the streets of
Les Cayes, led by incense and the Cross.
It was an incarnation of intersection, of the blurred boundary between
heaven and earth that the Book of Revelation points toward. Arriving at the church, about a thousand
people filled every space, including the stairs to the balcony; and others
crowded at the doorways. Stunning choirs
transported the congregation with the full-throated praise Haitians always
offer, singing like their lives depend on it, because they do. Clouds of incense filled the chancel at the
Gospel procession; more clouds of incense would envelop the altar before the
Eucharistic prayer. Dancers interpreted
God’s Word in body and in Spirit.

And then came the offertory. Of course, none of us knew what was coming,
other than figuring they’d take up a collection. Well, I have never seen such a deeply
sacramental sacrifice of thanksgiving, such a full presentation of people’s
life and labor to the Lord. For us, we
offer bread, wine, and money at the offertory.
When we get really symbolic, we add canned food to share with people in
need. In Les Cayes two weeks ago, they
presented tokens of everything God
had given them. As the choir and people
sang for joy, members swayed down the aisle and toward the altar bearing
bananas, and mangos, and okra, and peppers; beans, and rice, and potatoes, and
onions; squash, and wood, and flowers, and sugar cane – and two chickens, and a
goat.

And then, because God is a comic genius, just as I was getting all wrapped up in the deep
meaning of this stunning offering, the chickens started pecking at each
other. Now, they had been laid literally
before the altar, as had the goat – each animal with its legs bound, and with the
chickens’ wings wrapped in small, thin, black trash sacks. But the liturgical planning committee hadn’t
considered three key elements: First, chickens
don’t like to be right next to each other and
out of control. Second, chickens have
wings, and they can move by flapping those wings even if their feet are bound together. And third, thin black plastic is no match for
an angry chicken. And so, we witnessed a
literal chicken fight before the altar of God.
Now, in the eyes of the people there, it wasn’t that big a deal. Someone simply came over, grabbed the
chickens by their bound legs, and hauled them out.

Now, all this time, the goat was just lying
there, minding his own business, looking exhausted after his long trip bouncing
around in the back of a truck. But the
chickens’ misbehavior made people think twice about leaving the goat up there
for the Eucharistic prayer, so he was hauled out, too. Now, this left open two holes in the
offertory décor; and this is an Episcopal
church, after all, with a certain sense of order and propriety. So, to fill the holes in the tableau left by
the absent chickens and the absent goat, the Altar Guild sacristan ran up to rearrange
the flowers and bananas and mangoes and sugar cane into a balanced and
aesthetically pleasing visual presentation.
And, I believe, the Lord God did grin.

Now, the next scene I want to describe came
a few days later, as we drove between Les Cayes and Port-au-Prince. It was market day, so everywhere, people were
bringing the products of their life and labor to the village gathering place. We ended up following a truck on its way to
market – with chickens and goats dangling by their legs off the back and the
sides of the truck, clearly in great pain.
It’s a necessity of life in a culture without refrigeration: You get
fresh meat by keeping that meat alive as long as possible before you eat
it. So, creeping along the road into the
village, we were eye to eye with a goat, dangling by its legs, in its last
hours. There is little more pitiable,
and maybe nothing more vulnerable, than a goat or a lamb about to be
slaughtered.

Of course, all the Americans in our pickup
wanted to get out and untie the goat, and take him down, and ease his
pain. And of course, that impulse was more
about our discomfort than the goat’s well-being. We’d been happy to have roasted goat for
dinner the night before, but we weren’t so interested in looking dinner in the
eye as it suffered.

In a place like Haiti, you see sacrifice
up close and personal. Everything – and
especially every good thing – comes
at a cost. At our partner school in
Maniche, enrollment has increased by 50 percent from last year. In a classroom smaller than my office, in
tropical heat, there’s a first-grade teacher who every day shapes the hearts
and minds of 47 little people in that
small room. Picture that. Feel the heat.
Hear the fidgeting. Smell the
closeness. Now, this teacher comes to
work every day from her house near Les Cayes, so she bounces around the back of
a truck for an hour and a half every morning and for an hour and a half every
afternoon. Sacrifice is her job
description. She is paid pretty well in
a culture where the average person tries to live on $2 to $3 a day. But she earns every penny, two or three times
over.

That sacrifice will cost the teacher her life,
one day at a time. But it also brings life, and hope, to those 47 first
graders, one day at a time. That
teacher’s work inspires her students’ dreams – dreams of becoming doctors, or
teachers, or nurses, or agronomists, or business owners, or soccer players, or
linguists, or presidents – each of them professions kids actually told us they
wanted to pursue. And it’s not just the
teachers who sacrifice. Two cooks
prepare beans and rice for 300 kids every day in two pots on open fires. The headmaster keeps the peace and maintains
morale among teachers pushed to the limit, all the while teaching sixth grade,
too. Their day-to-day sacrifices bring
new life to children who otherwise would simply occupy their parents’ huts in
the next generation but might, instead, be president.

Of course, the other sacrifice is
yours. About 1 percent of your pledge
giving goes to support these ministries in Maniche. In addition, the Advent Card Fundraiser in
the Jewell Room pays the teachers’ salaries and buys textbooks. The Fools for Christ’s Sake Dinner next
Sunday funds the school’s lunch program.
These are not small investments that you, and we, make. We, too, offer our sacrifice of thanksgiving
when we pay our pledge, or buy an Advent card, or come to the Fools
dinner.

But you see sacrifice up close and
personal in Haiti. Living and dying
happens right before your eyes. And so does rising again. That Lamb at the center of the heavenly
throne made his choice to live, and die, and rise again for you, and for me,
and for our Haitian friends. And the
Lamb calls us to follow him as he shepherds us into eternal life, now and
forever. He leads us to make our own life-giving
sacrifice – a life of self-giving that
leaves you, and the world around you, stronger and healthier than
self-preservation ever could. This is
life that truly “revives [your] soul” (Psalm 23:3). For when we follow where he leads, the Lamb
who is our shepherd will guide us to springs of the water of life, where God
will wipe away every tear from our eyes (Revelation 7:17).

Friday, April 8, 2016

We’ve come to the end of our
last day on this mission trip. The
conference’s final session reinforced the themes we’ve been hearing: emphasizing being first and doing
second, practicing relationship rather than benevolence, finding assets rather
than scarcities, expecting mutual accountability, and focusing on individuals
rather than human abstractions. It’s the
heart of ministry. The only difference
is the context and the cross-cultural challenges in pulling it off.

Speaking of which … we also
learned something interesting this morning about our partner school in
Maniche. Yesterday, I wrote about the
benefits of creating an advisory board made up of leaders from the community and
school, as well as the church. We
discovered today that such a board not only exists but is mandatory; the
national education department requires that each school have one. I have no idea who its members might be, but
it exists (at least on paper) – so, a good start. But why hadn’t we ever heard about this
before? In a nutshell, we hadn’t asked,
and Pere Colbert hadn’t thought we would be particularly interested. Even after all these years, we have work to
do in building this relationship.

The conference ended with
Eucharist, and the highlight (as is usually the case in Haiti) was the singing,
led by one of the choirs of the Holy Trinity Cathedral Music School. The cathedral building was reduced to rubble
in the 2010 earthquake, but the cathedral’s ministries remain not just strong
but, in this case, glorious. The music moved people to tears.

After lunch, the St. Andrew’s
crew went to Haiti’s national history museum.
It survived the earthquake nicely, being built underground (reminiscent
of the WWI museum in Kansas City). It
tells the story of Haiti’s oppressive history: from the Spanish genocide of the
indigenous peoples, to the enslavement of African people by the Spanish and
French, to the revolution that created the first black nation-state, to a
series of leaders tempted by personal self-aggrandizement – several of whom
proclaimed themselves rulers for life (including a couple of “emperors” of
Haiti, complete with French-made royal regalia). It seems Papa Doc Duvalier was only following
a well-established pattern of leaders who exchanged a once-liberating heart for
the oppressor’s fist. And it helps
explain the historical DNA that challenges Haiti so deeply simply to complete
transfers of power under the rule of law.

Holy Trinity Cathedral's temporary worship space

We ended the day at Holy Trinity
Episcopal Cathedral. The site of the
beautiful church, with its famous murals, is now literally a parking lot. The earthquake took the building, but the
ministries of the cathedral’s faithful people go on. The cathedral congregation now gathers in a
temporary structure, only a shadow of the old building’s towering arches and
stunning paintings. It is not
aesthetically pleasing, to Northern eyes – probably not to Haitian eyes,
either. But it’s only a placeholder. Holy Trinity Cathedral will have a new home
someday, though when that will be depends on fundraising. It will be a glorious thing when a new
structure ushers in a new age, complete with reconstructed murals pieced
together from the rubble. As Haitian
Bishop Jean Zaché Duracin said at our conference: Yes, buildings toppled; 300,000 lives were
lost; and countless people remain maimed, physically and emotionally. But the Church goes on because “the
ministries and mission of the Church belong to God, not to us.” Since the earthquake, the bishop explained,
the Haitian church has been living out this unofficial motto: “Haiti, stand up
and walk!” (see Acts 3:1-10).

Amen. The only edit I might make, based on today’s
worship would be this: “Haiti, stand up
and sing!”

Thursday, April 7, 2016

Today is the anniversary of the
death of one Haiti’s founders: Toussaint L’Ouverture. Leader of the revolution against the French
slaveholders and Napoleon’s army, L’Ouverture was betrayed to the French during
the revolution. L’Ouverture was taken to
the harshest and coldest prison the French could find and basically left to die
of exposure. He died on this date in 1803,
just a few months short of the Haitians’ victory over their enslavers. As I said a few days ago, Haiti clings to its
national existence with a tenacity born of a centuries-long struggle just to
maintain it. If I were Haitian, I, too,
would remember the date of Toussaint L’Ouverture’s passing with a sense of
dignity.

Dignity came to be an important
theme in what we took away from today’s Haiti Connection conference, on macro
and micro levels. First, the macro: Much of what we heard today advocated flattening the top-down, vertical model of mission that many of our
congregations have been pursuing in places like Haiti, nearly always
unintentionally. When two parties come
to the table, one with great needs and the other with great resources, the
temptation to create dependency has been nearly irresistible. In any given moment, those needs cry out – in
this case, both the Haitians’ need for resources and the Northerners’ needs to
follow Jesus and help the poor. But when
we meet those needs reflexively, we foster a relationship that really isn’t a
relationship – at least not what we want that word to mean. The Haitians come to see us as providers with
fathomless pockets, and we come to see the Haitians as recipients who should
both appreciate our benevolence and understand why we want to dictate its
terms. All that we’ve heard, and hoped,
and dreamed here is about changing the model to one of mutuality – one in which
both parties have value to contribute, benefits to reap, and responsibilities
to fulfill. We can offer money to buy
food, pay teachers, and build buildings; they can offer a model of evangelistic
fervor (and results), Scriptural depth, and abiding trust in God regardless of
the moment’s outcomes. Can we say which
“side” has more to offer?

So, the micro examples of these
truths might look like this in St. Andrew’s relationship with St. Augustin’s
Church and School in Maniche. We’ve glimpsed
these truths in past visits, but (for me, at least) they’ve come into relief in
this one:

·We need to be in relationship with people on the
ground – even more “on the ground” than the priest who visits the school every
couple of months, the superintendent who also oversees five other schools, and
the headmaster who lives near Cayes and commutes up and down the mountain on
his motorcycle every day. We’ve been
trying to meet with St. Augustin’s vestry when we visit, but that’s been only
intermittently successful. And it’s hard
to build a relationship with an annual meeting.
In this day when some rural Haitian 7th graders have cell
phones, surely we can find a Maniche vestry member who’s on Facebook (the
principal is; he and I are friends). And
by developing a relationship on Facebook, God willing, we can figure out how to
broaden the network supporting the school to include a board made up of Maniche
community leaders and parents, as well as church people.

·We need to work with that board to create small
profit centers involving the school so that some of its support can come from
Maniche, not Kansas City. At this
conference, we’ve heard examples of churches starting small businesses that
plow some portion of profits into ministries like schools.

·We should change our funding model away from
paying all the bills and toward providing scholarships (nearly total, at first)
to defray educational costs for which the community bears ultimate
responsibility. That doesn’t mean
cutting people off; it means reversing the expectation over time such that the
community receiving the benefit bears ultimate responsibility for ensuring that
benefit is provided.

·With responsibility reversed, we must give up
control of the process for achieving results.
We and they agree on the desired outcomes; as the headmaster said, the
school should be the best in the region, bar none. But we need to leave it to the people who
live and breathe the context to figure out how to achieve our common goal in that
context. We need to stop telling people
what to do, live in what will be awkward silence for a while, and learn
to listen to what our partners have to say

All that builds dignity, the most
highly valued resource in Haitian culture and, by the way, a core value of what
it means to be a Christian in the Episcopal tradition (we promise at each
baptism to strive for justice and peace, and respect the dignity of every human
being). Here’s a final micro example of
dignity’s value here. Dr. Stan Shaffer
is with us but actually convening a different gathering; he’s working on
building an international network of birthing centers like Haiti’s Maison de
Naissance. The idea is to share best
practices among birthing centers, collaboratively solve problems, establish criteria
for high-quality care, and award a designation as a “Good Birthing Center”
according to those standards. Here’s the
question that came from the Haitian nurse-midwives at MN at the end of those
discussions: Can we get a literal stamp
of approval? Can there be a certificate
of award? Can we document, in an outward
and visible way, that we have, indeed, achieved a standard of international
excellence?

Wednesday, April 6, 2016

We’ve arrived back in
Port-au-Prince after a four-hour-plus drive from Les Cayes this morning. The “plus” was the time spent alternately sitting,
creeping, and zooming in Port-au-Prince traffic. Here, driving isn’t about safety; it’s about
survival. We made it after only a couple
of close calls. Par for the course.

We’re blessed to stay at the beautiful
Hotel Montana for the next couple of nights.
It is in Haiti, but it isn’t in Haiti.
I’m sitting in the bar overlooking the city and harbor below, with clouds
playing at the tops of the mountains on the opposite side of the basin. Even with the deforestation and the troubled city
below, the view is stunning. The Montana
also has the advantage of being high enough to catch the lovely breezes that
never seem to blow through the city.

The view from the Hotel Montana

Here, in the Port-au-Prince
suburb of Petionville, life is good. It’s
where the local elite and wealthy travelers enjoy Haiti as one imagines it
could be – with (mostly) clean streets and dependable plumbing, even air conditioning
and hot water. It’s a place where you
can enjoy “a feast of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained
clear” (Isaiah 25:6). Looking down on
Port-au-Prince, you only see that the buildings are crammed next to each
other. You don’t see their condition
from here; nor do you see the trash and stagnant water in the streets. This kind of contrast between rich and poor is
typical for developing nations, I know; but that doesn’t make it easier to
see. But it’s a good thing you have to drive
through the city to get to Petionville from the airport.

The people here at the Montana
for this Haiti Connection conference know the reality of rich and poor. All of them are involved in work on the
ground, far below Petionville. The
conference brings together Episcopal development efforts in education, health care,
economic development, construction, and work with special-needs populations –
and it includes the Haitian partners involved in those projects. Roughly half the 200+ attendees are Haitians
(though I don’t know that they’re all staying at the Montana). Partnership is the theme, in terms of
collaboration both between Americans and Haitians and among development projects. It’s amazing how limited our scopes can be. For example, St. Augustin’s School in Maniche
might be a good candidate for solar power.
But what experiences have other partnerships had with solar? I know of one (which wasn’t very positive),
but that’s hardly a good sampling. I’ll
just bet we can find more over the next few days here. We’ll also be sharing some of what St. Andrew’s
has learned. Carolyn Kroh is one of the
presenters on educational partnerships, talking about her work to train
early-elementary teachers in engaging, creative ways to teach concepts
typically memorized in Haiti through recitation. She has been a great blessing to our teachers
in Maniche and all the Episcopal schools under Pere Colbert’s stewardship.

Stewardship … there’s a divine
call that challenges me as I sit here in the Montana’s bar, enjoying the
view. Stewardship and justice,
actually. I believe there is huge value
in gathering these people to learn from one another, Americans and Haitians from
across both countries. There is huge
value in having these conversations onsite here, where the context is every bit
as much part of the curriculum as the presentations. And truly, the context’s chasm between rich
and poor, in which we are clearly participating, is also there on the table for
our consideration. I don’t have a clean
and satisfying way to reconcile why I get to sit here atop the cliff in
Petionville, overlooking the beauty and poverty below me. The poor will always be with us, Jesus says
(Mark 14:7), and they are blessed in that God chose to come, and become human,
among them. The reign of God is about
the miracle of us stewarding what God provides so that all may eat and be
satisfied (Luke 9:17). In our time in
this place of poverty and abundance, may we help bridge the chasm both through
what we give and through what we take away.

Tuesday, April 5, 2016

Going up the mountains from Les
Cayes to Maniche, the view from the back of the truck can be grand or
demoralizing, depending on your social location. For this visiting blan, it was wonderful to ride back there in the relative cool of
this morning, experiencing the sights, sounds, and smells of Les Cayes very
much close up, along with the motorcycles carrying parents and kids to work and
school, the occasional truck, and the many tap-taps. Moving out of town and into the countryside,
you exchange constant horns and exhaust for a more tropically bucolic scene –
but you also lose the pavement and find progressively more “rustic”
roadways. Still, the air, the vistas,
and the 360-degree scenery make bouncing on your bottom worthwhile.

At least that was my
experience. Yesterday, our interpreter
rode in the back of the truck because we picked her up last. It occurred to me I should have offered her
my seat inside, but we had taken off by the time I remembered my manners. It turns out I should have asked Pere Colbert
(who was driving) to stop the truck.
When I asked our interpreter this morning if she’d like to ride inside,
she accepted quickly and gratefully. “The
people on the side of the road yelled awful things at me yesterday,” she said.

I wanted to know more, but manners
suggested I not press her for details. I
wonder what this young Haitian business-management student endured, riding in
the back of a pickup while the four blans
rode in air-conditioned comfort. In a
culture where dignity is everything, her placement there probably evoked some
ugly images of subservience. Of course,
it was the last thing any of us (including Pere Colbert) would have
intended. So, on several levels, it was
good for me to ride in the back of the truck today – including the chance to
get this video of crossing the river to St. Augustin’s School.

At the school, we took photos of
the other half of the 300+ students.
Note to self: Next time, start with the pre-kindergarteners and work
up in age, rather than starting with sixth grade and working down to the tiny
3-year-olds. My knees and back are not
happy this afternoon.

As we took their pictures, we
interviewed the kids (at least those in first grade and up) about their
families, their favorite subjects, what they do for fun, and my favorite
question: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” The answers to that question seem to be
growing in diversity and complexity as the years go on. In past visits, we’ve always met a lot of
future nurses, teachers, and physicians, and those are still popular
choices. But this time, we also heard from
several future agronomists and business owners, two future priests (both
female), a future linguist, and quite a few future members of the Haitian
national soccer team. These are dreams,
of course – and that’s the point. When
children can dream, that says good things about what dreams may come.

The teachers are dreaming for
St. Augustin’s School, too. We met with
the headmaster and teachers after school today.
Samuel Sauray, the headmaster, wants nothing less than his school to be
the best in the area, bar none. We asked
how the teachers explained the school’s improvement in test scores, and they
said it has much to do with St. Andrew’s commitment to provide textbooks for
kids whose parents can’t afford them. Sure,
some political correctness may have been at play, but they have a point that
students can’t complete homework without books.
Looking down the road, the teachers see a need for teaching assistants
in classrooms with 40+ children (I know I’d need an assistant), as well as
additional space to accommodate the growing enrollment. From a perspective of scarcity, we can hear
that and scoff, “It’s just a dream.” But
so was a hot-lunch program a few years ago.
And we already have the beginnings of a fund for new construction at St.
Augustin’s.

We didn’t promise anything, of
course. As the wealthy blans dropping in for a visit, we’re
always trying to be partners and not simply patrons; and it’s easy for both
sides to slip into historic roles of recipient and benefactor. Instead, we’re trying to dream, and plan, together.

Monday, April 4, 2016

First, a quick addendum to
yesterday’s post: The World's Best Offertory Ever was made all the better
today with the discovery that the goat at the foot of the altar was “our”
goat. It came down the mountain from St.
Augustin’s in Maniche, our partner church and school where we spent today. Given the nature of the drive, on mountain “roads”
that are more like riverbeds, I know why the goat was tired by the time it got
to church.

Today was our first of two days
at St. Augustin’s School.Sadly, we got there too late to see the flag ceremony, which begins
every school day.All the classes –
three levels of kindergarten and six elementary grades – line up outside their
classrooms to raise the Haitian flag and to sing the national anthem.It’s a nearly sacred act in a country where
simply existing as a sovereign state has never been a given.Colonization and slavery; a war for
independence; forced reparations payments to the nation it defeated in gaining its freedom; decades of ostracism by the family
of nations; absent commercial development; interventions by regional powers,
including the U.S.; several strings of failed governments; strong leadership
turned to bloody dictatorship; more failed (and self-interested) governments; a
devastating earthquake; NGO work that often shunts indigenous leadership aside;
and, now, political messiness that makes simply electing a president a
seemingly impossible task.Despite failures
imposed upon it and failures of its own making, Haiti defiantly continues to
exist.And at countless schools across
the land, young Haitians celebrate the dignity of nationhood every morning.

At St. Augustin’s School, we
found good news to report.First of all,
we were struck by the fact that the kids look generally healthy and adequately
fed.That has not always been the
case.I remember visits when we could
pick out the malnourished kids because of the dullness of their eyes and the
orange tint to their hair, secondary to kwashiorkor (severe protein deficiency).A few years ago, St. Andrew’s started a
hot-lunch program serving beans and rice, a high-protein meal, to the kids
every day.I can’t say the lunch program
has made all the difference, but it’s certainly made some of the
difference.

Half the first-grade class at St. Augustin's School in Maniche

Second, the enrollment has
increased by about 50 percent in the past couple of years. More than 300 students are packed into tiny
classrooms that seemed too full the last time I was here, when there were about
100 fewer kids. The first-grade class
has about 50 children, all in one room we might
put 25 into.

That’s a function of other good
news – that St. Augustin’s test scores have been rising consistently. Our school is now among the top three in the Maniche area, ranking ahead of the Roman Catholic school. And when we made home visits with some of the
students this afternoon, we heard it from the parents’ mouths: They have a
choice of schools (something we didn’t really understand until a few years
ago), and they choose St. Augustin’s both because of its reputation in the
community and because they see the progress their kids are making. As one mother said, “I want my children to be
able to know things I don’t know and do better than I could do.” It’s the same story for any parents in Kansas
City concerned with their kids’ educational opportunity.

Of course, success and growth
bring their own challenges. Fifty kids
in a small classroom isn’t an example of sustainable growth; and every new
student is also another mouth to feed, as well as another mind to fill. We’ve known intellectually that St. Augustin’s
needs more classroom space, as well as support for more teachers, books, and
lunches. This year, we’ve seen that
reality up close. The Fools for Christ’s
Sake Dinner, coming up April 24, will be great opportunity to keep making a
huge difference here.

We also encountered the kinds of
endemic challenges mission work in Haiti faces. This time, it wasn’t the natural elements;
the river is down, and the truck could cross it “no pwoblem,” as the Haitians
say. Last year, we provided several
laptops for class use. Apparently
battery life is compromised by tropical conditions, and we found today that the
laptops’ current batteries can’t be recharged.
So, we asked about getting more batteries in Les Cayes, the city where
we’re staying. But of course, in a
culture where few people own personal computers, batteries are scarce. So we’ll see what we can find in
Port-au-Prince. As we discovered in a previous
trip, running electricity (legally) to the school would involve multiple
thousands of dollars. But solar power
generation? Another school near Les
Cayes is using it. Perhaps that’s the next
thing to consider, though I know Maison de Naissance, the Episcopal birthing
center, didn’t have a good experience with solar power a few years ago.

Anyway, for every experience in
Haiti – positive as well as negative – there is always the next challenge awaiting
you. As the saying (and book title)
goes, in Haiti there are always mountains beyond mountains….

Sunday, April 3, 2016

We’ve finished lunch after four
and a half hours of procession, worship, and speeches this morning at St.
Sauveur Episcopal Church in Les Cayes. I
was honored that Pere Colbert asked me to be among the 25 or so clergy
concelebrating Eucharist – quite touching.
We processed through the city streets, arriving at the church about 9
a.m. The day celebrated both the bishop’s
blessing of the renovated building (which is beautiful and now has a balcony to
accommodate the overflow crowds) and the 150th anniversary of the
arrival of The Episcopal Church in southern Haiti.

As an event, the morning was
tremendous. Along with the bishop and
the gaggle of clergy were three choirs, liturgical dancers, a band, the local
mayor, and more people than the building could hold. Folks were sitting on the stairs to the
balcony and lingering at the doorways – for three hours of worship and another
hour of speeches. Sweating through a
borrowed alb, I nearly stayed completely conscious.

There was another presence in
the room, one I was blessed to glimpse at the beginning of our worship. First, you have to know that the windows in Haitian
buildings are open to the outside, so visitors from the animal kingdom are no
great surprise. As we gathered around
God’s altar, singing with joy and power, I saw something near the ceiling out
of the corner of my eye. It was a white
bird, flying from one side of the building to the other, then going out the
window and on its way. Rationally, I
know it was a pigeon; but in my memory, it will become a dove. I’ve had this sort of thing happen once
before, at St. Andrew’s a few years ago, when a bird literally walked into the
narthex one afternoon, flew around a bit, and finally flew back out the door it
had first used. I saw that visit, years
ago, as a sign that the Holy Spirit wasn’t content simply to be in the church. The Holy Spirit wants to lead us out of the
church and into mission with the people around us. Well, here in Les Cayes, I think it happened
again. The Spirit flew in, nodded
approvingly, and flew on out. I think we’d
be wise to follow.

The other animal visitors today
were brought by parishioners. The
accompanying videos show the World’s Best Offertory Ever. Two explanatory notes: The chickens eventually had to be removed
because they started fighting at the foot of the altar (there’s a sermon in that); and the goat is alive (though
tired, apparently). We know, intellectually,
that the Offertory is intended to be our presentation of all of our life – “our
selves, our souls and bodies,” as the Eucharistic Prayer says. Whatever we have, whoever we are, whatever we
feel, whatever gifts we’ve received – all of that goes into the offering plate
on Sunday morning. Well, it’s one thing
to know that. It’s another thing to sacramentalize it, and
that’s what the people of St. Sauveur did this morning in the World’s Best
Offertory Ever.

You know, even when the chickens
we bring to the altar act up and start pecking each other; even when our goats
lie lifeless; even when we don’t quite know where to put the flowers – in it
all, the Lord God is well-pleased. And
probably chuckling.

Saturday, April 2, 2016

We’ve made it to Les Cayes in
southwestern Haiti after an exhausting but oddly energizing day. The 6 a.m. flight from KC seems like it left a
couple of days ago now….

Today (like every kingdom day,
properly understood) was a study in trust.
Once we arrived at the Port-au-Prince airport and recovered our luggage,
we wheeled a comically overloaded cart out the door. That doesn’t sound like a particularly
trusting thing to do, but we actually had no idea who was coming to pick us
up. The anonymous driver was supposed to
be carrying a sign with Carolyn Kroh’s name, but specific expectations are
something you learn to lose in Haiti travel.
Meanwhile, we had to run the gauntlet of probably 50 young men, all of
whom would be competing to touch our overloaded cart and thereby earn a share
of the tip. But the drivers aren’t allowed
to come into the terminal, so out we went.
As it turned out, the driver was there, complete with Carolyn’s name on
a sign.

The second case study in trust
came from the driver himself (whose name I never could make out). He led us to his vehicle, and the lucky
designees from the gauntlet of young men offloaded the luggage cart, each of
them earning at least five times a daily wage in Haiti in that one tip. The driver made the payments and convinced
the hangers-on to go back to the terminal.
He started the car, turned on the A/C (blessedly) … and sat there. Before he even put the car into reverse, the
driver closed his eyes, clasped his hands, and spent a couple of minutes in
silent prayer. I did, too. Prayer is always a good idea; but if your
driver is praying, it’s probably a good idea to join in. He crossed himself, put the car into reverse,
and made his way into – and finally, out of – Port-au-Prince. The prayers were a wise choice, both in the
city and along the “highway” toward the southwest region of the country. Imagine people walking and riding bikes along
the white lines of I-70, and you get the picture – but add dogs, goats, and
pigs, too.

The third case study in trust
comes from the Haitian people themselves.
Every time I come here, I’m struck by the seamless interweaving of the
sacred and the secular. Flannery O’Connor
writes about the American South being a “Christ-haunted landscape”; if that’s
true, then the spirits of all the saints are alive and well and inhabiting
Haiti. Everywhere you look here, you see
proclamations of trust in God. And you
need only look at the oncoming traffic and the businesses lining the road. Most of the tap-taps (multicolored trucks
serving as public transportation) bear proclamations above the windshield, and
most of them are faith statements. Here
are a few I saw today: “Merci Jesus”
(thank you, Jesus), “Grace Divine,” “Fils de Dieu” (Son of God), “Jesus Mon
Seul Espoir” (Jesus, My Only Hope), and “Jesus Revient” (Jesus is Coming Back). Looking from the oncoming traffic to the
businesses you’re passing by, you move from sublime proclamation to stunning
mash-ups of deep trust and commercial necessity. Here are some actual business names we
passed:

·Nouvelle Jerusalem Salon

·Merci Jesus Bric-a-Brac

·Grace Divine Pharmacia (maybe that one works)

·Lumiere de Dieu Reparation d’Auto (Light of God
Auto Service)

·Le Sang (Blood) de Jesus Boutique

·Jehovah Store

·Christ Capable Matériaux de Construction (building supplies)

·And perhaps my favorite – Pere Eternal (Eternal
Father) Lotto

These may strike us as amusing,
but there’s more there than meets the funny bone. Day in and day out, people here take their
faith to the level I think God would like to see from us all: to the level of deep
trust that acknowledges God’s sovereignty and overwhelming love, regardless of
the outcome we get in a given moment. You
see it everywhere you look in Haiti – Grace Divine.